Ignorance Is Bliss: Why Unlearning History is So Hard, and So Important

Eva-Maria Swidler

In my first year or two of teaching
world history, I had the experience that I am sure many of you have had. I
taught all semester long, only to discover at the end of the season that a
significant segment of my students had missed the point of my class entirely. I
boggled that students could spend fifteen weeks in my anti-Eurocentric
classroom and somehow find confirmation of the very ethnocentric ideas that I
thought I had so clearly and effectively problematized. Let me repeat that. At
the end of a semester with me, notable numbers of students did not merely
disagree with my views on history, or leave unconvinced of my critiques of
conventional textbook narratives, but were absolutely sure that they had heard
directly from me things absolutely contrary to what I had said to them for
months.

However, after several semesters of
similar experiences, it was clear to me that my baffling results were
reflecting some important systematic realities, if I could just figure them
out. I started to pay close attention when the perplexing scenarios arose. I
realized that students were not building new and problematic understandings based
on our class together, but rather were specifically hanging on to previous
beliefs. In other words, they left my course thinking more or less exactly what
they entered thinking, despite the intervening months.

Being a faculty member of a college
based on the so-called progressive education model of learning, of which John
Dewey is perhaps the most famous adherent, I should not have been so surprised,
I guess. As I of all people should have remembered, our students are not empty
vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge. And the problem in my
classes was not that insufficient knowledge had been presented by me, nor that
students did not know "enough" history before they arrived in my classroom. If
either of those situations were the case, students would just have learned less than I hoped, rather
than absolutely nothing. The problem seemed instead to be that the students in
question had been impervious to what I said, and to what went on in the
class. But why?

Not long thereafter, I read a
wonderful piece in a faculty newsletter from the teaching support office of one
of my universities. (It is no longer available for reference, thanks to its
loss in the transition of teaching support resources from print to website). It
argued that, although college faculty not uncommonly complain that new
students do not come with "enough" knowledge about a given field, in fact
faculty should be far more concerned about what students do "know". In
many fields, history often among them, what passes for disciplinary education
in many high schools is not inadequate, outdated, or insufficient, but
downright problematic. New college students often need to cast off basic
assertions and assumptions that were taught to them as universally accepted
fact in their secondary years. But, as this perceptive professor pointed out,
many students simply do not and cannot imagine that what they have been taught
as truth and reality actually is not universally accepted as such.

Sometimes students do hear
what we say that contradicts their earlier education or their common sense
views, and aggressively reject our new approach as biased. (Typically, any new
view which is different from the one that they hold as common sense will be the
one which is perceived as biased, while the familiar view is taken as transparently
true.) Or occasionally, students try heroically to find places in their current
worldviews that they might tuck in a few new things that we say; sometimes
students experiencing deep cognitive dissonance when their previous learning
proves to be incompatible with the academic views they begin to encounter at
college employ various psychological and intellectual techniques to try to
digest and understand the new ideas in terms of their pre-existing
concepts—i.e. they try to fit novel ideas into the old structures and
terms that already make sense to them, even if the new ideas actually
contradict the pre-existing ones.

But in my experience, those
students who cannot accept it when their paradigms and worldviews are being
deeply challenged by college classes resort most often not to explicit
rejection of new views, nor to incorporation of new knowledge into old
paradigms in athletic and contorted ways, but to active misperception: they hear
selectively, they hear distortedly, and they hear things that just plain
weren't said, because they just couldn't believe their own ears.

Here's a more understated take on these
students' drastic efforts to preserve their pre-existing understanding . "(M)eaningful
learning involves assimilation of new information into the learner's
existing knowledge structures…meaningful learning occurs when the learner
deliberately seeks to relate and incorporate new information into relevant
knowledge structures she/he possesses….[but]If learners attempt to link new
information to the faulty ideas they possess, the result can be more
elaboration of these misconceptions…"1 (emphasis added). That is, in their attempts to learn by harmonizing and
attaching new views with old ones, often students will hear our challenges to their understandings instead as confirmations of their views.

The pedagogical ideas I've talked
about here, that is cognitive dissonance and the methods people use to mitigate
it, and constructivism as a theory of how people create world views and
meanings, are commonplace ideas in psychology and education. Science educators
in particular have already spent a good deal of time and effort in figuring out
ways to short circuit students' commonly held unscientific explanations and to
make good use of cognitive dissonance; they have also found ways to help
students actively build new, scientifically sound, understandings to replace
the uprooted old ones.

For instance, The Private Universe
Project, studying the efficacy of science education at Harvard, concluded that
many students will graduate from the "best" colleges with the same scientific
misconceptions that they had when they entered grade school, even after
extensive Ivy League science coursework. These
science education researchers observed how deeply rooted misunderstandings
built in childhood are, and how strongly they resist change, even when under
concerted attack by presumably authoritative figures such as Harvard physics
professors. Students will even disbelieve their own real world lab experiences,
if they don't fit with the beliefs that they are committed to. An entire
pedagogical website has been built off of this work, including videos, lesson
plans, and theoretical articles.2 Historians could make relatively easy use of a lot of this pedagogical research.

Two useful observations for us in other
academic domains emerge from these discussions in the science world. First, the
science educators learned quickly that it is not enough to just present
material that contradicts unscientific ideas. Students will often merely add
this contradictory new information right on top of a rotten foundation, rather
than acknowledging the incompatibility of ideas, and then revert to the
foundational old ideas as soon as they are out of the classroom. (The Private
Universe project's website has painful footage of graduating Harvard physics
students on their commencement day, giving erroneous explanations about basic
planetary movements.) The researchers' take-away? In order for a teacher to
successfully replace unscientific ideas, it is essential to first elicit
from students what their pre-existing ideas are. Only when forced to
confront what their 'private universe' is, will students see the fundamental
contradictions between the old views to which they have remained loyal and the
new views being offered, thus opening the possibility, at least, of
meaningfully accepting new views.

Secondly, scientists observe
that when scientific explanations are not offered to children when they are
young and curious, usually because teachers think that the children are not
able to understand abstract concepts, children naturally construct their own explanations for phenomena, which then become almost impossible to displace. Accordingly,
science educators urge teachers to introduce scientific concepts much earlier
than is conventional in our school system, arguing that children are far more capable
of reasoning than we give them credit for; that capacity for reason and explanation
is exactly why children feel such a need to develop their own theories, absent
a scientific one. This recommendation is a confirmation of what James Loewen,
for instance, found in teaching history in an elementary school. In a lesson he
gave to grade school students on public history markers dealing with race in
the U.S. South, the children quickly came to their own contextual readings of
sources, and proposed the importance of who wrote those markers and when. His
conclusion is that fifth graders can easily "do" effective historiography.3

Indeed, as I ask my students each
semester, "How often have you heard a youngster on a playground say, 'You're
just saying that because you want me to….' Apply this kind of playground critical
thinking to a primary source, and voila, even young children can flourish in
the field of historiography."

If our only challenges lay in how
to productively confront cognitive dissonance and in how to harness or guide the
process of the construction of historical knowledge, we world historians would
be busy, but clear in our educative path.

But we in history have further
challenges. Firstly, unlike science professors, we are not necessarily dealing
with an unsuccessful high school attempt to instill a body of knowledge that we
endorse. Instead, as James Loewen writes on the first page of the introduction
to his best selling book Lies My Teacher Told Me, "College teachers in
most disciplines are happy when their students have had significant exposure to
the subject before college. Not teachers in history…A colleague of mine calls
his survey of American history "Iconoclasm I and II," because he sees his job
as disabusing his charges of what they learned in high school. In no other
field does this happen…Indeed, history is the only field in which the more
courses students take, the stupider they become."4

A milder but fundamentally no less
devastating assessment is made by Sam Wineburg in an essay in his book Historical
Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past. According to Wineburg, some combination of a heavy reliance on textbooks,
standardized testing, and teacher preparation programs which produce high
school history teachers who were never history majors, has led to a downright
ahistorical approach to history in secondary education in many schools across
the country. Often students graduate not with a straightforward lack of
historical knowledge, nor even a chauvinistic idea of how history has unfolded,
thanks to the politics of textbook selection, school boards, and dictated or
"canned" curricula. What too many students come out of 12th grade
with instead is a firmly entrenched misunderstanding, created by their
education, of what the field of history even is, and of what historians do. 5

So, unlike the causes and
affirmations of unscientific ideas among students, whatever problematic ideas
students come to our college classes with are not only rooted in larger social
issues (which we'll discuss later), but have often also been actively validated
in myriad ways by their previous formal educational experiences. That myriad of
ways includes of course what history teachers and textbooks say and do, but
also what they don't say or do, and how they say it or ignore it. That is to
say, all the components of the covert or hidden curriculum have frequently been
hard at work confirming exactly what we in college then hope to dislodge.

One of the most fundamental
misunderstandings students arrive with is the idea that historians are questing
after, and do eventually attain, a fixed, single, objective story line. Any so-called
debates among historians, most students believe, are merely trying to settle
the questions and collectively move on, or pin down points of fact not yet
fully researched; debates are not, for students, larger questions of theory,
paradigm, argument, or relevance. How do we help students to unlearn this basic
idea of what history is? For surely that must happen before anything
else.

Sam Wineburg, in the essay
mentioned above, has claimed that students can only deeply grasp how much
history is and must be an individual act of construction if they engage in
history writing themselves. At least in the circumstances in which I typically
work, having introductory level world history students do primary research is realistically
out of the question. A practical issue then is how we can ask students to
construct historical knowledge; what raw materials can they use? In my very
first class each semester we do an exercise to tap that experience of
construction, without relying on research. I ask students to write two
biographies of themselves, both totally accurate, but each as different as
possible from the other. Then we discuss all the decisions that they had to
make in that process: the choices of voice and register, the inclusion and
exclusion of facts, and maybe most important of all, the implicit questions being
answered by the different autobiographies. My hope is that this exercise
highlights the role of the historical narrator in making what I call for them "editorial
decisions". The goal is to open room for seeing historical debate as something
more than a battle between the simple truth and falsehood of the facts being
deployed, and to complicate ideas of objectivity.

In fact, my courses do not "teach
the debate", as the now commonplace phrase goes, taking pains to find two views
on every topic we discuss. That pedagogical strategy in my experience allows
students to, incredibly, avoid the idea of a fundamental debate by
posing the dust-up in their minds as the struggle between the ever-present categories
of the "right aka objective view" versus the "wrong aka biased view", rather
than getting them to think deeply about paradigms, objectivity, or the role of
the researcher in creating knowledge. In other words, the strategy of "teaching
the debate" is too often once again deformed by students into a validation of
their worldview. If we teach the debate without challenging students' concept
of what historical debate is, they may pit their understanding of any
given era or event or topic against another understanding that they see as the fallacious
one, and unsurprisingly find their views vindicated. Or they may transform the
idea of debate and argumentation in history into the popular concepts of opinion and fact, seen as
divergent and complementary realms. In this intellectual strategy, students see
history in the terms that old journalists made use of, distinguishing between "news
stories" on the one hand and the editorial and opinion pages on the other. Debate
among historians, for these students then, becomes not about "the facts", which
they believe are of course are a single body which all historians would agree
upon; debate is reduced to nothing more than a discussion in the realm of
opinions.

So instead of "teaching the debate",
I teach the fact of debate, the idea that what historians do is
to write arguments, defend views, and engage in theory and logic. The concept
of historical debate IS the syllabus and the theme of my class; this theme is
reinforced by an almost daily review of our location in the syllabus and the
logic of the syllabus construction—a reminder of why we are talking about what
we are talking about. Without fourteen weeks of repeatedly foregrounding the idea
that historians by trade explain and interpret and argue, students are in
danger of leaving our courses with perhaps slightly altered fixed narratives,
and no long-lasting idea of what the discipline of history is. To unlearn the
idea that history is a timeline and an enterprise of scientific objectivity
takes longer than a semester of focused effort, but I can make a good beginning,
by making the nature of debate the theme of my class.

I want students to learn that
historians debate because I want them, the students, to also think
critically about their own historical ideas. But if we apply the lessons
learned from the science education people, we see that before our students can
examine any of their own ideas in the light of other, competing, historical ideas,
they must first unlearn what they assume to be absolutely true about history.
And, to do this, they must first excavate what their common sense tells them,
whether it is the common sense of what it means to be Western, or of America's
role in the world, or of technology's importance, or many other cultural
assumptions. In other words, to go back to the words of the science
education researchers, students have to acknowledge and express their private
universe before they can reflect on it.

Ideas about society and history are
fundamental to human socialization from the time of infancy, extremely deeply
rooted and connected to a dense web of concepts about the world: gender, class,
race, human nature. Our intellectual excavation in the humanities must
go far deeper than one that aims at asking students to, for example, re-think
why we have the seasons. Our conceptions about ourselves and our culture, as
well as about others, are built into everything from children's games and
jigsaw puzzles and cartoons to magazine ads and billboards and comedy routines.
What we don't know about ourselves and other people, what we are
ignorant of, is also built into the world around us.

Agnotology, the philosophical study
of ignorance, points out that ignorance is culturally produced, considers the
uses of ignorance, and proposes how and why certain knowledges do not or did
not come to be. Rather than a sociology of knowledge, agnotology is a sociology
of ignorance. In our case, we world historians might apply agnotology to say
that our students' ignorance of certain histories is produced and reinforced
actively by a wide-spread cultural understanding that says that some people
don't and can't have a history—American Indians, Africans, tribes, "natives",
people without writing. To have a hope of teaching world history, we must teach
about all those invisible histories, and to teach those students anything about
those invisible histories, we must first get students to realize and acknowledge
that they most likely actually think that those invisible people can't have
a history, in my experience a widespread, basic paradigmatic assumption of
American students.

This is no easy task! People have
some unease at voicing what they think on sweeping issues of world
significance, not only for fear of looking ignorant but also for fear that they
may be seen as racist or otherwise unacceptable, even though they are quite
possibly expressing what many if not most people in the room think.
(Mild humor can be a way past this obstacle; I have had good luck, for
instance, with having my students read the article "So Many Africas, So Little
Time", by Jonathan Reynolds, laying out the stereotypes of Africa, from Africa
as a giant safari, to Africa as a benevolent village raising children, to
Africa as a corrupt disaster zone.)6 But the largest obstacle of all is that my students are largely convinced that
they themselves don't know any history, and that therefore they themselves have
no paradigm.

Of course, they do have one, just
like they have an accent, though they had to discover that fact at some point
as a child. So every week, I prove to them that they have absorbed a
historical worldview from the society around them by asking them questions that
they think must be trick questions, because the answer seems so obvious. I ask:
Is it better now for women than it was in the past? Have people always
categorized strange people by using racial categories? Is globalization modern?
Was homophobia common in the past? Then I position their newly articulated
"common sense" view against the readings that we will do, which are specifically
chosen to contradict the very views that they have just stated as self-evident
to anyone. Their private universe exposed, we can begin to discuss it.

Analogy has proven to be another
particularly powerful ally in deconstructing profound and invisible explanatory
structures, when students' foreheads crease with confusion. Many cognitive
psychologists claim that we are more analogical than logical thinkers;
importing entire structures of understanding and explanation is often far more
effective than painstakingly building new ones piece by piece. My experience
has endorsed this view. For years I tried strategy after strategy to clarify
the proposition of historical accident—for instance, James Blaut's proposal of
the significance of geographical location rather than natural or cultural
superiority in creating Europe's current global power. Only when I serendipitously
hit upon the metaphor of parking did students facial expressions clear up. Did
getting a choice parking spot outside a club mean that the driver was a more fit
practitioner of the art of driving, or did getting that spot depend on whether
they happened to drive by the desired location at the exact time it happened to
be vacated? Did it depend on expertise, or on the luck of whether the driver
got stuck behind a garbage truck? Similarly, my presentations of historians'
dissatisfaction with universal stages of development and teleological history largely
went nowhere, until I compared teleological history to a model of a railroad
with a track on which societies could move only forward or backwards versus a
hiker breaking path in any direction. Universal sighs of relief went around the
room as students grasped chance, possibilism, and alternative modernities—key
concepts of history.

We have a particular challenge, and
I would argue responsibility, in promoting critical thinking in the field of
history as compared to other humanities and social sciences. History is
especially explicitly linked to legitimizing our cultural ideology of
domination and superiority. There is a great push to, as Panayota Gounari
writes, tell "history from a hegemonic
point of view, thereby securing a world order to be legitimized through the
construction of a discourse of common sense."7 Common sense
is used here in a Gramscian sense, to mean the assimilation of a culturally
specific, dominant ideology to the degree that the ideology seems natural, and
becomes invisible as belief or interpretation. Under a regime of common sense,
a particular view of particular people becomes taken instead as self-evident reality.

Because
of history's particular importance in justifying the way the world is, visions
of history are embedded and proposed by politicians, businessmen, journalists,
artists, and every other variety of cultural producer in speeches, news
reports, paintings, dances, advertisements and movies. What we as historians in
the classroom face, then, is not merely a historical narrative that is the end
product of earlier history teachers and school systems, but the strength and
invisibility of a worldview implicated and reinforced by constant daily
encounters in every aspect of society. We historians face off against an
interpretation of history that is invisible to members
of our culture like water is to a fish. This is the private universe
that must be articulated in our classes. Although the challenge of this
situation is immense, it is also therefore pivotal, a key to opening up a space
for self-reflection and a consciousness for students of themselves as
culturally created and situated beings.

This
intimacy of history with the publicly trafficked just-so stories—stories
that assert how the world came to be the way it is—can make the cultivation of
unlearning common sense history feel like an assault on a fortress. To create
the first crack in the defenses, which may take the entire semester for some
students, I have come to agree with my friend who teaches the history of
race in America. He recently said to me, "The very first thing I learned when I
started teaching this stuff was that I had to lose the nuance." Employing
nuance, so beloved of historians, with students who have not yet absorbed that
there are debates and paradigms in history merely allows those students to more
easily decide that what they are hearing from you can't possibly be what you
are saying, and that you must be really confirming what they already know. It
takes uncomfortably stark, bald, even aggressive, statements to alert students
to the idea that you actually want them to consider questioning or changing
what they already "know".

But the
close identity of history with wider cultural ideologies provides some
opportunities for us, as well. In the field of pedagogy, it is well known that
the sociological, emotional, and psychological loyalties of students determine
the fate of learning in the classroom. In virtually all college settings,
barring perhaps the most elite, there will be at least a few students who have
chosen to say to their earlier teachers, in the worlds of a book title by
educator Herbert Kohl, "I won't learn from you." There will be students whose
own personal and social realities put them at a distance from the dominant
narrative and who, therefore, exercise superior historical and critical
thinking. The textbook story of the past is not theirs; as it has been taught
to them, it is so unacceptable
that they have refused to suspend disbelief and embrace it. These students
persist in a deep skepticism of the positivist and boosterish curricula they
encounter, despite the bad grades and other punishments that come their way as
a result. They are the hidden allies of our historical deconstruction, planted
across the room and often unknown to us until they pop up at a key moment, and
they provide us with the entre to the students that we need.

Many
studies have also shown that many students learn best, or sometimes only, from
the example of other students in the classroom. Some students lead the mental
way for others, serving as intermediaries or bridges for those who can imagine
themselves engaging and practicing new and difficult skills only by seeing
others in their cohort do so. But simultaneously, getting the skeptical students
who have previously been squelched to volunteer their heterodox positions and
lead the way for the rest is hard. If I can get that to happen, I have won a
major victory in setting up a classroom where students will begin to wonder
whether their particular understanding, their common sense, is really the only
one, after all.

To create
this dynamic, actually diverse classrooms are essential—diverse in social
class, diverse in race, diverse in gender, diverse in national origin—because
it is most often someone from among the night students, the students of color,
the immigrants, the women, who most quickly grasps the idea of competing
narratives and paradigms. Those students' own experiences as outsiders to the
dominant narrative set the stage for an almost instinctive understanding of
alternate interpretations and realities. Encouraging those students to
speak up, while simultaneously encouraging participation from conventionally
minded students who find it very hard to imagine another way of seeing things,
is quite a trick. But it can be done.

To breach
the intellectual defenses of students' private historical universes, the
atmosphere of the classroom is pivotal. If, to unlearn common sense, it
is essential to first extract a statement from students of their private
historical universes, then students must feel safe; otherwise, they will not offer up their real thoughts and
beliefs. Students of every ilk must feel themselves
to be treated with equal respect and time, and they must each anticipate a
gently supportive response from me as the teacher. So, I offer no special
enthusiasm for anyone. Students quickly read what they think the teacher wants
to hear and shut down any alternative expression they might have made, if they
sense a preference from me. I find something provocative, valid, and useful in
every single student statement, no matter how deep I have to reach to get to it.
I use the phrases "that's an interesting idea" and "I hadn't thought of that"
repeatedly, and I leave questions hanging unresolved at the end of discussions.
Students hate that, and that tells me how important it is. It is only the
absence of an impending right answer that can spur students to reflect and
discuss, and as long as students feel that the classroom is a place where their
competency will be judged, rather than a place for collective reflection, they
will perform expected tricks for us, rather than think openly.

What we then do in my hopefully welcoming and open classroom
is to practice history as a skill rather than a content base, and to think
almost endlessly about the connections and implications of unlearning. When we
ask students to unlearn the idea of history as a string of facts, and to
unlearn Western exceptionalism, and to unlearn race and gender as self-evident
categories, we are asking them to consider undoing an entire mental framework
that they have used to understand the world. When students tug on one piece of
their history, if they do it properly, their whole intellectual edifice shakes.
Without rehearsing and elaborating and integrating their unlearning, as well as
incorporating new alternative ideas, the momentum of their ongoing complete and
intricate worldview inevitably pulls them back to the default views and
intellectual structures they and you worked so hard to question.

The construction of new knowledge that I ask students
to do, then, involves practice and repetition rather than mere comprehension,
and uses these skills of deconstruction as a new way to approach the implicit historical narratives all around
them in public culture. I show movies and ask students to analyze them for
their presentation of history. I send students to museums and ask them to write
papers deducing the worldview of the curators. I assign students to find
several books on a single topic which each display a different paradigm and
approach to that topic. And we spend hours in class talking about wherever the
conversation takes us, sometimes superficially quite far from the reading at
hand—perhaps to a current news event, and perhaps to a music video. Might
the students be delighting in taking me afield during class time? Yes they
might, but I rarely find it difficult to make connections between our
discussions to the grand themes of the class, and I count these discussions as
among the most valuable we have. If students cannot go out after our class and
see cultural artifacts, from media coverage of foreign policy to popular
culture, as part of the way in which their historical worldview is generated,
my class has accomplished nothing.

Once the can of historiographical worms has been
effectively opened for students, there are several other consequences to be
addressed. Part and parcel of discovering and distinguishing the paradigms implied
in assorted accounts is imagining who produces those various accounts, and why
they do so. Only with this step can we end up at our desired final destination:
starting to imagine what kinds of standards and judgments we can apply to
historical debates. Without these explanatory and evaluative steps, we end up
in meaningless historical relativism.

After students grasp that we are truly offering the
possibility of multiple interpretations, each built out of a series of often
uncontroversially true facts into very different overarching pictures, the
natural next step for many is to try out the idea that all accounts are equally
valid. The terror in my heart is that this is where students will remain upon
leaving my class. As I repeat to them every week or two, if historians thought that all
accounts were equal, why would we bother studying and researching and writing
about history? We'd just enter the field of creative writing.

When we move past describing the
fact of the existence of multiple interpretations to the active application of the
essential historiographical questions of who writes what kinds of accounts,
when, and why, and whether or how we accept those writings, we are brought to
the heart of controversy—controversy both academic and political. My students,
anyway, when they really get what we are analyzing, begin immediately talking
about contemporary issues of war and intervention, poverty and race, gender and
labor. In fact, James Loewen has also argued pretty convincingly that unless
history is taught in a way that brings it into direct connection with our
contemporary world, a way that tries at least to explain the reality
around the classroom, it will be ignored by students everywhere.

Here we trip over the nub of a problem
of our own. On the secondary level, and increasingly in higher education as
well, teachers face an array of real practical obstacles to teaching
historiography: a lack of time, the need for classroom control, pressure from
parents to teach the "basics," demands by administrators for more
"coverage," and imperatives to prep children for standardized tests. In
college classes, the deterrents to teaching debate are more subtle yet perhaps
stronger. Students are predictably attached to their accounts, loyal to their
understandings, and defensive of their identities, all of which are challenged
by critical examinations. Although I would like to think otherwise, I feel
pretty certain in my own mind that the growing weakness of academic freedom,
under corporate style university reorganizations and with 75% of college
faculty living in a permanently untenured state, significantly deters real,
meaningful, and thorough-going examination of historical unlearning and debate.
Perplexed as well as irate students are inevitable results of deep discussions
on the nature of historical truth and interpretation. Whether we can
personally as well as institutionally risk these necessary aspects of
intellectual growth will dictate the relevance of our discipline of history for
the public.

Starting with the techniques of active
unlearning and building upwards, I'd like to leave students with
well-considered ideas about the evaluation of historical claims and increasingly
sophisticated perspectives on intellectual validity and judgment. However,
those perspectives take historians years and perhaps decades to cultivate. I am
content if the forty hours that I spend with a student in an introductory world
history course uproot some previously unexamined ideas and plant some new ones
about the nature of truth and the moral responsibilities of knowledge. The
harvest, if there is one, will be many seasons later. Techniques of unlearning
can give us some of the skills we need; we will also need courage to sow those
seeds.

Eva-Maria Swidler is currently
on the faculty of the interdisciplinary B.A. program at Goddard College, and
teaches part-time at the Curtis Institute of Music. Most recent publications
include an article in the Fall 2013 issue of the AAUP's Journal of Academic
Freedom and a chapter on environmental history in the book Greening
the Academy, which just won an award from the American Educational Studies
Association.

2 The website is a section of a larger site called Annenberg Learner. This
section is entitled Private Universe Project in Science and includes almost
fourteen hours of videos, as well as other resources. It is available at http://www.learner.org/resources/series29.html

3 James Loewen, Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of
Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History (New York: Teachers
College Press, 2010), p. 71.

5 Sam Wineburg, "On the Reading of Historical Texts: Notes on the Breach Between
School and Academy" in Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts:
Charting the Future of Teaching the Past, pp. 63-88 (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2001).

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